LOS ANGELES (NYTIMES) – They know exactly what they got away with. “That’s the most R-rated G you will ever see in your life,” said Tab Murphy, a screenwriter of Disney’s animated The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, which was released 25 years ago this month.
However it came about, a ratings board made up of parents decided that a film with a musical number about lust and hellfire and a plot that involves the threat of genocide against gypsies was appropriate for a general audience.
The fact that what is arguably Disney’s darkest animated movie earned a rating on a par with Cinderella reflects the subjectivity of the rating system – and how much parents’ tastes have changed over the years.
“PG today is the equivalent of what G was in the 1990s,” said Kirk Wise, who directed the film with Gary Trousdale.
“Nowadays, you can’t even smoke in a G film,” added Trousdale.
But one scene, in particular, defies explanation. “That Hellfire sequence?” Murphy said, referring to the Stephen Schwartz-Alan Menken song sung by Judge Claude Frollo about his conflict between piety and lust for Esmeralda.
Murphy had long wanted to adapt the 1831 Gothic story of Esmeralda, a beautiful Roma girl who captures the hearts of several Parisian men, including Quasimodo, a bell-ringer with a severe hunchback whom author Victor Hugo describes as “hideous” and “a devil of a man”.
Of course, the novel was “too depressing” for a Disney film. So Murphy had to get creative.
Instead of Quasimodo (voiced by Tom Hulce) being whipped on the pillory, he is pelted with vegetables and humiliated at the Feast of Fools. Hugo’s troubled archdeacon, Claude Frollo (Tony Jay), became an evil magistrate.
Unlike in the novel, Esmeralda (Demi Moore) is saved by Quasimodo and the dashing Phoebus (Kevin Kline), the rebel captain of the guards. All three live happily ever after instead of dying, as both Quasimodo and Esmeralda do in the book.
But, Wise said, there was always one looming issue they had to deal with: Frollo’s lust for Esmeralda. “We knew that was going to be a really delicate topic,” he said. “But we also knew we had to tell that story, because it’s key to the central love rectangle.”
Murphy recalled: “Stephen and Alan said, ‘We think that can be a great song.'”
Six months later, a small package from Schwartz, who wrote the lyrics, and Menken, who composed the score, arrived at the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California. Inside was a cassette with a new song.
Murphy, Trousdale, Wise and Don Hahn, the film’s producer, gathered in an office, popped the tape into a cassette player and pressed play – and realised what they were hearing.
“This burning desire,” Frollo sings in the film, rubbing her scarf sensuously against his face, “is turning me to sin.”
Murphy said: “At the end of it, Kirk reached over, clicked off the cassette player, sat back, crossed his arms and said, ‘Well, that’s never going to make it into the movie.’ And it did!”
A G-rated film, according to the Motion Picture Association of America system, which was introduced in 1968, “contains nothing in theme, language, nudity, sex, violence or other matters that, in the view of the Rating Board, would offend parents whose younger children view the motion picture”. Some snippets of language, it says, “may go beyond polite conversation but they are common everyday expressions”.
What ultimately got the film its G rating, Wise said, was a change so tiny that “you’ll never believe this”. In the scene where Frollo sneaks up behind Esmeralda and sniffs her hair, the ratings board thought the sniff was “too suggestive”, he said. “They were like, ‘Could you lower the volume of that?'” he said. “And we did, and it got the G rating.”
Hahn, Menken, Murphy, Trousdale and Wise all agreed there would be no chance of the film getting a G rating today.
Yet the movie has stood the test of time – Frollo, Wise noted, feels like a “very contemporary” villain in the #MeToo era – and remains a favourite among young adults who rewatch and discover references they missed the first time around.
“Maybe, in retrospect, Hunchback was a bridge too far,” Menken said. “But I am glad they took that bridge too far.”